The Nature Of Atheism

The criticism and myths on why we departed from religion and lost our belief in god are too damaging if no one will attempt to correct the myths popularized by the religious bigots. These type of people do really believe and are willing to spread the lies about atheists, such us, Satan worshipers, criminals, close-minded people, and all negative attributions they can imagine that can be thrown to us since according to them atheists don’t have god therefore they are bad or immoral.

I’ve heard that majority of believers do believe that we become atheist because we know nothing about bible. That is a lie. In fact, there are several research have shown that it’s a big fat lie.

I have heard that atheists are not compassionate. That is not true. In fact, highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers. This finding disproves the myth about atheists don’t have compassion since only the believers can have it.

There are several factors we should observe that majority of believers know nothing even a bit about us and the bigots refused to accept.

The psychologists who study the behavior of atheists offered various models on why we become atheists.

One of them is Dr. Paul Vitz who offers different theories why there are atheists.

One explanation of atheism is atheism as a result of scientific principles and rational philosophy and many scientists become atheists simply because they believe that God and science are incompatible. So in this case atheism is caused by knowledge and not directly by any personal frustration, hatred towards father or need for progress. This sort of atheist is the ‘intellectual atheist’ who purely needs evidence and believes that God and religion cannot be explained and thus should not form part of our discussion or understanding or suggests that the question of God is a delusion or that God does not or cannot exist. Many scientists and philosophers, sociologists and even artists are in favor of this sort of position.

To confirm the claims here are some of the peer-reviewed papers and articles from different science sites:

According to Flynn effect, the rise in IQ scores also corresponds to a rise in intelligence, or a rise in skills related to taking IQ tests. Study says, “…examined the extent to which time-related gains in cognitive performance, so-called Flynn effects, generalize across sub-factors of episodic memory (recall and recognition) and semantic memory (knowledge and fluency). We conducted time-sequential analyses of data drawn from the Betula prospective cohort study, involving four age-matched samples (35-80 years; N=2996) tested on the same battery of memory tasks on either of four occasions (1989, 1995, 1999, and 2004). The results demonstrate substantial time-related improvements on recall and recognition as well as on fluency and knowledge, with a trend of larger gains on semantic as compared with episodic memory [Rönnlund, M., & Nilsson, L. -G. (2008). The magnitude, generality, and determinants of Flynn effects on forms of declarative memory: Time-sequential analyses of data from a Swedish cohort study. Intelligence], but highly similar gains across the sub-factors. Finally, the association with markers of environmental change was similar, with evidence that historical increases in quantity of schooling was a main driving force behind the gains, both on the episodic and semantic sub-factors. The results obtained are discussed in terms of brain regions involved.”

Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief and religious belief drops when analytical thinking rises but not superstition and such. The reason is intuitive thinking leads to quick-and-dirty answers via mental shortcuts and gut feelings; the analytical thinking involves more deliberate, effortful thinking. Since intuitive thinking appears to support belief in the supernatural, psychologists reasoned that analytical thinking might be one source of religious disbelief – indeed, questionnaires gauging analytical thinking and religious belief found that people who were more likely to adopt an analytical stance tended to report they were less religious.

In response to Asa: Atheism might be the unconscious default for infants. However, In most places in the world. Faith, or one kind or the other, is the societal default. So therefore it is still a question worth researching in what makes certain individuals buck that societal default. The correlation between IQ and atheism is worth mentioning. However I think the most important correlation is between education level and atheism. The is already a known strong correlation between education and IQ. It is a misconception that IQ is some sort of fixed static number that one is born with. Of course all this goes back to the nature vs nurture question. The best way I have heard this question addressed is that 90% of what makes humans different from other animals is nature while 90% of what makes individual human different from each other is nurture (after all our genetic makeup is pretty much the same from person to person, if we share 97% of our DNA with chimps imagine how close our DNA is from person to person).